


in this new language our bones say sun and sea

by Starbrow



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Most Everybody Dies/Even Living is Pretty Bad, Angst with a Happy Ending, Aslan doesn't look good in this, Edmund/Susan If You Squint, F/M, Gen, but happy ending?, oh there's already a tag for that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 22:04:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12067869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starbrow/pseuds/Starbrow
Summary: reminding us of an oldlanguage our mouths have forgotten, but ourmarrow remembers.





	in this new language our bones say sun and sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [be_themoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/be_themoon/gifts).



 

_You do not have to be good._  
_You do not have to walk on your knees_  
_for a hundred miles through the desert repenting._  
_You only have to let the soft animal of your body_  
_love what it loves._  
_Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine._  
_Meanwhile the world goes on._

_____ _

 

He had to wake up, but he couldn’t. And when he finally could, he instantly wished he hadn’t.

At the faint groan from the bed, there was a rustle of movement, and a soft hand touching his own - it hurt - everything hurt - he always imagined dying would hurt less, at least after you were dead. He must not be dead.

Peeling his eyes open seemed to take a Gargantuan effort. Even open, they would not focus properly on the woman sitting by his bed. He already knew who it was. Lavender and amber, it had never changed even in this world.

She was crying, or had been. She was all in black, and her face was bare and bloodless. “Su,” and Edmund’s voice came out in a croak, rusty as if from disuse. “What…”

“Shh.” Cool fingers stroked his hand. He was grateful to simply lie there a moment, not to speak. Everything ached, dully, in spite of the blanket of what must be something strong and opioid. “Shh. It’s all right, Ed.”

It was not all right, but he slept, because he could not do anything else.

~.~

She told him gently, when the doctors said he was strong enough. Edmund felt the tears fuzz over his lower lids, hot and stinging. Susan brushed them away with a handkerchief, but she let him weep as she had wept for the family they had lost in a moment. The accident at the station had claimed them all, left dozens more injured. “They thought you were dead, when they pulled you out,” she said, and her hand was trembling. “No one knows how you survived, standing on the platform like that.”

Edmund swallowed. The pain was suddenly fitting. 

~.~

It was several weeks before he could go home. Neither of them could bear to go home to Finchley. Susan set them up in her flat instead, where all the memories were new and achromatic. Edmund learned to manage the crutches, listened to the radio, read a great deal, slept a great deal more. The days seemed endlessly grey. 

Time heals all wounds, the saying went. So why did each day bring a sharper realization that they weren’t coming back? Each night was less a bad dream and more a solid weight pressing down on him. He had too much time to reflect now.

“You’re lucky, having a job and a few hours to have to think about something else,” he said to Susan one evening.

Her smile was tinged with sadness, as they always were now, her eyes filled with the knowledge that only he could share. “It’s not the escape you’d think. Especially when tired and you just want somewhere private to have a cry.”

It was as close as they came to talking about it, in those first days. It was too raw, too new. He didn’t want to think about what it must have been like for her, having to identify everybody...after...but he couldn’t help but think about it when the sounds came from the sofa at night, tight and brave. 

There was no slipping quietly over, but he pulled up the crutches and tap-tapped a slow path in the dark to her, slithered down when she made room, put his good arm around her. Her fingers curled around him, grasping. Holding the remnants of their family together. And they were the only ones who knew. What had really happened.

They had been left behind.

~.~

“We have to get out of here.” It became a necessity, the longer they stayed put, trying to reassemble a life out of the twisted wreckage. The bright pain had not faded, had only become something that haunted and chased them down.

Susan nodded. They had the means, now. There was money, a settlement from the rail, and there was freedom, no one to tell them to be reasonable. Even their aunt and uncle had fled; by their last letter, they were somewhere in the states, with a key left in custody for the Pevensies should they need the house (but please leave it as it was when they vacated). That wasn’t where Edmund wanted to go.

“Let’s take a ship. Visit Greece, Turkey, Egypt. Anywhere you want to go, we’ll go.”

“Australia,” Susan said. There was light in her eyes again, despite the ever-present shadows around it. “To see what the films talk about, the adventures there.” The posters advertising a world of new frontiers and fortunes, for a pittance of a price for British emigrants. 

“Shall we get the ten-pound fare, then?” An attempt at teasing.

She surveyed him calmly, but there was a hint of the old spark when she said crisply, “If you’d like to rough it for two years with the dingoes, I’m not going to stop you!”

~.~

In the cramped stateroom, life suddenly became bigger, a world beyond what England could hold for them. Hope was a strange, reckless shoot in the abandoned weeds, but it thrived in the salty air, the sunny days, the rainy nights. Their small berths on board were not much bigger than the snug cabins about the Hyaline, Edmund couldn’t help but think, just as he couldn’t help but hear the gasps of dark visions in the night, of naked fear and sharp realization.

It was easier, here, to slip in with Susan and budge up into something tightknit and private that didn’t need words. Shadows were in safe keeping, for both of them were complicit. As they had been shut out, so they could shut out the rest of it for a little while each night in darkness and be wholly themselves, wholly bare.

It was good, not to pretend.

~.~

Sometimes, they spoke.

Susan’s skin was still damp with sweat from what she had seen tonight. “It was Peter, this time,” she said, to Edmund’s back. She took more comfort in holding him than the other way around, and so he let her hold him.

“Mm.” Encouragement, but light, unpressed.

“He was standing there, on the platform beside you, but he was in Narnian clothes. He kept trying to hold your hand, but you wouldn’t let him.”

Edmund gave an amused grunt. “That sounds like Peter, all right.”

She squeezed his waist, as near to pinching as Susan would get. “He wanted to bring you, Ed. He just...couldn’t. He held a yellow light in his hand, and it glowed brighter, right before…”

His hand tightened over hers. She didn’t need to say it. “Yellow,” he said instead. “The rings?”

He felt her nod behind him. “I’ve seen it before.” A pause, and then, “Last year. I kept having the same dream. It frightened me. A yellow light, and then an explosion, and pain, so much pain.”

“You tried to get us to forget,” Edmund said slowly. “That’s why you…”

She let out a long breath, and his hand relaxed. It hadn’t worked, and now it was just them. The ones who hadn’t made the final cut. 

~.~

Australia took at least a month, as it turned out, to explore even in part. They rode horses across the paths of its hills, as near to the mountains as they could get, stayed in little inns, spent other nights under the stars and breathed the clear cold air until their lungs ached. Edmund wondered how the birds in flight could bear it, so much colder on the windstreams above. Maybe it was a small price for the freedom of their journeying. The wild cacophony of geese heralded the coming of dusk, and it sounded to him like trumpeters gone mad with joy.

He captured what he could with his camera, although the film that he’d develop at the next major city would seem a pale reflection of the powerful beat of broad wings or the tempestuous splash of the sun dropping over the mountains. They were only reminders, when the reality of it was far behind him.

They could have spent far longer here, but there was more corners of the world to see, and even in a country as large and wide-open as this one, Edmund felt restless and heart-hungry.

“Let’s see India,” and Susan, looking knowing, agreed at once. 

~.~

Her heart was a hummingbird’s wing against his back. He exhaled, as if to remind her how it was done. “The same dream?”

“Yes. And no. He was telling me something, his lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear what it was. He became less...real, more transparent, and then vanished into...something else. Someone else. All I could see was the yellow light in their hand.”

The pouches of rings in the bottom of his suitcase, what had seemed safer to bring with them than to leave behind, had begun to sing a siren’s call. He was beginning to dream about them too.

Edmund turned, shifting in the narrow berth. “It’s our heads, playing tricks with us. That door is closed.”

The door to Narnia. But the yellow rings weren’t just to Narnia, as they both knew very well from the Professor’s stories. 

~.~

They walked through the crowded markets, the golden Queen and her fair brother, the smell of spices thick in the air and the bazaars teeming with flowers and bright exotic fruits and wares they would never need.

It was like the old days, and not at all like them, and that was the way it should be.

~.~

The smell of the sea wove into his dreams on the shores of Greece. It was not Narnia that he dreamt of, strangely, but it was not anywhere he’d been before, either. Someplace important.

Where, where? he asked nobody. Nobody answered.

The dappled yellow of sunlight in the Hagia Sophia winked at him, and he blinked away the drops of gold from his vision.

~.~

“I don’t want to go home.”

Susan touched the carved wood railing of their esquife. “We must,” she said simply. “Sometime. We can’t run forever, Ed.”

“Maybe,” he said, looking toward the horizon, “we haven’t run in the right direction yet.”

“Not just tricks with our heads then.” Her voice was quiet, plucked away by the whipping breezes. 

“No.”

She gazed out too, at the coastline of whitewashed buildings and limestone cliffs. “Every time I think of using them, I remember Aslan’s words that last morning. About what we must do in our world.”

Edmund nodded; it was not far from his mind either. The sound of the water suckling at the hull filled the spaces between words. He breathed out. “I’m beginning to think our world isn’t this one.”

A minute or two, and she said nothing, but came to him and laid a hand on his shoulder, and he put his arm around her and thought of how right it felt, that they should be the two out of any of them to belong somewhere other than Narnia. It didn’t hurt as much as it once had.

“When you’re sure,” she said, “we will go.” 

~.~

A whim of the night, to visit the medium advertised in a window of Barcelona (a whim more readily indulged for the smaller print that English was spoken there).

Edmund was not sure he placed much faith in the trade on Earth, but he went anyways. Susan, the woman said, was more open. It all seemed very generic and easily guessed to Edmund - things about journeys, heartaches, happiness, and the sort - until the medium looked at him in the middle of her tarot reading and smiled strangely.

“A light in the heavens sends greetings from a table with a knife,” she intoned in a dreamy voice. Edmund started visibly. “Do not be afraid, Son of Adam, to follow the light. It will not guide you wrong.”

He couldn’t help but look at Susan. Was it possible...did Ramandu dance in their heavens too, could he see their path ahead to another world? She seemed to be thinking much the same as he was.

Edmund turned back to the medium. “Do you see anything else?”

“Yes,” she said, and reached across the table with the end of her shawl to brush his cheek. “You have a smudge on your face.”

~.~

It was a long night of ‘what if’s and ‘are you sure’s and ‘no not at all’s. In the end, it felt more right than not, and so they followed their instincts. For two logical people, Edmund considered that quite a feat. 

“We can always use the green to come back,” Susan said, for what must have been the third or fourth time. “We’ll bring markers for each pool, and supplies.” 

“Winter coats,” Edmund suggested helpfully, and she gave him a long-suffering look.

“We’ll need to arrange matters here just in case. You never know with this sort of thing.”

He nodded. “We’ll wait till London, then? To see the attorney and set everything to rights before we…”

Go on to the next adventure.

~.~

It took rather longer than Edmund would have liked, and the days began to seem interminable. A thousand persnickety details to attend to, a hundred affairs to manage just...in case…

Perhaps, he thought to himself, this is why they were too old for Narnia. A child could simply… _go._

He was glad, ten times over, it was Susan there with him, steadying him, cautious, practical. It hurt and it didn’t, to think of Lucy, the golden lights in her eyes like the stained glass, ready to go _now._ Peter, wanting the four of them to go together. Their mother and father, their cares at peace at last. They were where they belonged.

Was there even such a place for him, now?

They knelt beside the bed, drawing out the small case. They had everything strapped to them; there was nothing left but to draw out, wrapped in a handkerchief, the rings, the green for their pockets, and the yellow, winking with possibilities -

Edmund had to remember how to breathe. 

Susan met his eyes. “You’re sure?” Her voice was night-quiet.

“The only thing I’m sure of anymore,” he said, and his hand was upon hers, something solid, as they reached for the yellow. “It’s just us now.”

~.~

And like a flash, they left the world behind.

~.~

How long they were in the Wood, Edmund never could tell, later. Time didn’t seem to matter there. But they both knew the pool they were to try, when they came to it. A light shone from beneath its waters, pale and unquantifiable. Susan drew the steel marker from her pack with its etched number. _1_ They had nine more. Just in case.

And the pool they had come from, a little stele left by its shore. _Earth._ But neither of them wanted this just in case any more. Not here. 

Edmund wondered when it was that the fear had crept in, the jolt of it tight around his lungs as they jumped. Maybe it had been there all along; maybe he hadn’t realized it, in its guise of pain. Yet it was something strong and vital too, within him, something _real_ , something like the tremble of Susan’s hand, something she felt with him. It was - _oh_ \- all right to let it be with him, here.

He just had to keep falling..

Deeper and deeper, the darkness shifting to something more formative, but - insubstantial. Edmund reached out instinctively with his free hand, but it was clamped around the ring. He put it in his pocket. There, now he could touch - ah, it was just out of reach - 

“It’s not really _there,”_ Susan whispered beside him, and he felt more than saw her pulling her hand back too from the amorphous shape in front of them. Had they emerged from the pool? It was strangely hard to tell. Edmund would have thought it very clear, where the water ended and the new world began, but -

There was nothing underfoot. The barest essence of light was strange, shifting, not overhead. He couldn’t decide where it was coming from. All he could really feel was Susan’s hand.

“Don’t let go,” she said quietly, fiercely, and though she could not see him, he nodded.

**_Tanrilar,_** the world breathed at them, and they both startled. It was not a sound the ears could hear. But it was there. 

“Where are you?” Edmund asked, feeling like he was shouting into the void around them.

_“Who_ are you?” Susan asked, and her voice seemed to ring out, quieter and louder all at once, though her fingers had not stopped their trembling.

**_We are Dünya. We are reborn this day - but we are young, Tanrilar. So young. We are nothing, nowhere. We_ are _not, yet._**

The words pulsed in their blood. Of all worlds Edmund had imagined finding, one newborn had not been among his visions. Oh, it was so _new,_ it seemed to quiver on wobbly legs before them, visceral and yet beyond their human senses.

“You were calling to us,” Susan said, like she was drawing on what she knew. “From our world. You wanted us here. Why?”

It was as if the answer hummed within them before it was given substance. **_O Tanrilar, we will always call to you._** Edmund could have sworn the world chuckled at them, as if it was a question with a patently obvious answer. **_You make Us._**

_“Make_ you?” Edmund burst in. “How? We just got here. We haven’t had time to make anything.”

The amusement, again. _**You are the reason we are born. You make Us more real, every day that you are here.**_ The idea that formed in them, _day_ , was a strange thing, something more like _portion,_ Edmund thought.

“And if we leave?” Susan asked, in that quiet way he knew so well. Practical, skeptical, _real._ There were yellow rings in their pockets; they were not bound here.

The world was silent. There...would _be_ no world.

“And if we stay?” Edmund prompted.

Something glowed from their clasped hands. A small thread, but from it a thousand more spun beneath the darkness, still to be unspooled, and with them the sands of a vast shore, the thunderous roll of white-kissed waves and winds from the mountains, the thick hang of spices, the cant of fractured light through cut glass, the beat of wings and hearts. It was all _there,_ but without definite form or physical being.

It was their own bodies that held form and shape and _being._ Edmund heard Susan inhale sharply like gasping, like flinging above the surface of water and drinking in air. There _was_ air, because they needed it, and it was generous around them, folding cool around their skin. He felt it fill his lungs, and there was no struggle there between the fear and the life, the darkness and the light. It was simply...him.

He wanted it for Susan. He wanted it for himself. Banished no longer, the long night over, and each part of themselves full and whole and right. 

Tanric. Tanrica. Not just King and Queen this time. It was too much for a Daughter of Eve, a Son of Adam, his mind protested. They could not be goddess and god in this world, what if their own weaknesses tempered it flawed, to its destruction someday -

“Ed.” Her voice, low and gentle, cut through the noise of his own thoughts, and Edmund squeezed her hand, hard, grounding himself with Susan. “This is why we’re here. Why we were _there._ Even if - if we’re not ever really _ready_ for these things...has that ever stopped us before?”

He felt her smile, and then he saw it, and it was dawn breaking over the Tasmanian Sea. 

Edmund swallowed. He turned to - to the world, to Dünya. “It is both of us, or none of us,” he said, hoarsely. “We are brother and sister. _Human._ Not gods in our world. But if we can stay in this one, and make it something…”

Dünya was cradled between their hands, and spoken on their tongues. _**It is enough, Tanrilar.**_

 

_You do not have to be good._  
_You do not have to walk on your knees_  
_for a hundred miles through the desert repenting._  
_You only have to let the soft animal of your body_  
_love what it loves._  
_Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine._  
_Meanwhile the world goes on._

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary from "A New Language" by Casandra M. Lopez  
> Prelude and postlude from "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver
> 
> Turkish words borrowed for this language (in the spirit of Aslan):  
>  _Tanrilar_ : gods  
>  _Tanric/a_ : god, goddess  
>  _Dünya_ : world


End file.
